Memories Between the Lines

The other day, I was looking through my reading record book, which goes back to the autumn of 2010. I’d been trying to make some lists of books, and I always enjoy skimming back over my records of reading from time to time. Let’s face it, my memory is such that if I didn’t keep a physical record, I’d never be able to recall what I read and when. Books that I enjoyed would stick in my head, but I’d never be able to retain the complete picture. But I never realized, until the other day, the other side of that coin—just how much memory is captured between the lines of a reading list.

As I skimmed down the titles, I found myself recalling sights, scents, colors, seasons—where I’d read the books, and how, and what was happening around me. I spotted where I got my first Kindle (Christmas of 2010) because I remembered that Her Prairie Knight was the first ebook I loaded on it. I could remember the smell of different library books, what the covers looked like—or the pesky not-to-be-removed cover slips on my plentiful interlibrary loans, which kept me from ever seeing what the covers looked like. I’ve never found any interesting scraps of paper or margin notes in library books; just one maddening copy of To Kill A Mockingbird where somebody had underlined phrases and sentences in pencil on almost every page—it looked like it had been diced up for some sort of grammar lesson.

Some books that I loved absorbed me so I don’t recall a thing about the reading experience; with others, sharp details jump out of the reading list as if it was yesterday. I remember reading Nine Coaches Waiting and My Antonia curled up in the rocker-recliner in our parlor, forcing myself to stop every few chapters and save some for the next day, so I could savor the gorgeous writing longer. Pastoral and Kathleen I read up on the deck by our pool—and that sparks a memory from before I began keeping a record book, of reading Life With Father up there by the umbrella table on a late summer afternoon. Or sitting down on the deck steps, glued to The Woman in White for hours. Reading The Glassblowers sitting on the floor next to my bed one night, by the light of a single lamp, and finishing it even though I’d resolved to only read a few chapters before bed. The Way We Live Now and Little Dorrit were read over many afternoons on the lawn swing…Old Rose and Silver and Susan Coolidge’s entire What Katy Did series kept me from boredom during a particularly nasty illness.

Something Fresh and Pendragon’s Heir imperiled meals, as I continued reading them straight through the process of cooking supper. I remember blundering all over the house, trying to keep one step ahead of a housecleaning in progress, while devouring Dear Enemy by Jean Webster…”cramming” on Texas Civil War history (research for One of Ours) in the dentist’s waiting-room because of non-renewable library books due the next day. Spilling orange juice on my Kindle trying to read Until That Distant Day during a solitary breakfast…snacking on a bag of salad croutons left over from a graduation party while absorbed in Cards on the Table…catching a few chapters of They Were Expendable while waiting for the Superbowl to begin and the meatballs to finish cooking (the year the Seahawks won)…reading Chekhov’s The Lady With the Dog at the kitchen table while trying sausage and peppers for the first time, and deciding that I liked the sausage moderately well, but couldn’t stand Chekhov.

Books seem to spark more vivid memories than any other inanimate objects—perhaps because they’re not really inanimate once we begin reading them. Perhaps because we become so mentally engaged with a good book that it weaves itself into the fabric of our experience and memories. I suppose that’s why many people have been able to write memoirs built entirely around their reading life. I’ll bet it’s surprisingly easy—glancing back over this post, I see every scrap of memory could become a story. At any rate, it gives me one more reason to be glad I started keeping a reading log almost five years ago.